{"id":88783,"date":"2015-08-13T11:21:24","date_gmt":"2015-08-13T15:21:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=88783"},"modified":"2015-08-17T16:12:19","modified_gmt":"2015-08-17T20:12:19","slug":"burgers-and-copters-shelves-and-pants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/08\/13\/burgers-and-copters-shelves-and-pants\/","title":{"rendered":"Burgers and Copters, Shelves and Pants"},"content":{"rendered":"

How rebracketing gives us new words.
<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Find_the_differences_(painting_by_Peter_Klashorst)\"<\/a>

From Find the Differences<\/i>, a series of paintings by Peter Klashorst.<\/p><\/div>\n

How is a helipad like a cheeseburger? It\u2019s all about arms being legs, and having an ear.<\/p>\n

There are words that sound right in a language and words that sound wrong, and the latter often, as the gangsters say, go on a little trip. A sound or two will be dropped like a stool pigeon with cement shoes (from the front, apheresis: [k<\/em>]nife<\/em>; from the back, apocope: memo<\/em>[randum<\/em>]), or added or modified, and the word will be domesticated. What\u2019s easier or lazier than changing anything is to leave it as is and see it differently: a process known in life as getting a new perspective or reframing, and in linguistics as rebracketing.<\/p>\n

Unusually for such technicalia, rebracketing<\/em> is a good, solid English word, not Latin or Greek. Other terms for the same thing, false splitting<\/em> or juncture loss<\/em>, are also easy to grasp, and in fact each more poignant than the last. False splitting, juncture loss\u2014they sound so lovelorn. It hurts to see things that go together come apart. <\/p>\n

A person or thing from the German city of Hamburg, notably including a certain local-style ground-beef patty, is a Hamburger. To English speakers knowing and caring little or nothing for German origins, and well aware of a meat called ham, the word is rebracketed: [Hamburg][er] becomes [ham][burger]. Now there is a new unit of meaning in the English language\u2014burger<\/em>\u2014combinable in forms of its own: cheeseburger<\/em>, fish burger<\/em>, Angus<\/em> burger.<\/em> (Hamburg <\/em>itself, incidentally, is the product of rebracketing, in this case pleonastic fusion. Ham<\/em>\u00a0means \u201ccity\u201d\u2014surviving in place names like West Ham or suffixes, as in Birmingham; a hamlet is a little one. Burg<\/em> means city, too. <\/em>[Ham][burg] is Cityville.)<\/p>\n

In the case of burgers, the rebracketing happens because something seems likely, a meat dish called ham-<\/em>; in other examples, it\u2019s because something seems unlikely. In Greek, a wing is a pteron<\/em> or ptero\u2014<\/em>known to seven-year-olds from pterodactyl<\/em>, the flying dinosaur. So something characterized by a wing that spins,\u00a0helix <\/em>or helical <\/em>(Latin, meaning spiral),\u00a0might naturally be called a helico-pteron, shortened by simple apocope to [helico][pter]. Since \u201cpter\u201d is such an unnatural sound in English, this gets rebracketed as [heli][copter], and two new units of meaning are born (police copter, helipad<\/em>). A pterodactyl is arcane enough, and cool enough\u2014just ask any seven-year-old\u2014that the odd word survives, though even there the p <\/em>goes silent. But if it\u2019s specialized enough, even a wrong sound can live on (knish<\/em>).<\/p>\n

It seems common for one member of the newly rebracketed pair to be dominant\u2014a burger is <\/em>a hamburger; a copter is <\/em>a helicopter\u2014but sometimes the other member, however dominant it once was, can disappear altogether. A large container to hold or transport everything is something \u201cfor it all\u201d\u00a0or \u201cfor all of them\u201d\u2014in Latin:\u00a0omnis<\/em>;\u00a0<\/em>in the dative plural: omnibus<\/em>. Today, an edition that holds every book in a\u00a0series might still be an omnibus, but the motor vehicle that holds every traveler, known as a \u2019bus for a while, ditched the apostrophe and became a mere bus. <\/em>The allness, the for-everyone-ness, that was the whole point is now gone, and half a suffix from [omn][ibus] has become a word of its own. In this way, and hopefully not many others, a bus stop, too, is like a cheeseburger.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all a bit polyamorous, and it\u2019s all in the brackets, which are a lot more fluid than they look.<\/p>\n

Originally, a bracket was a little piece of wood or stone projecting from a wall, with a flat top, forming a shelf\u2014basically, something that looks like the top half of a bracket symbol \u201c [ \u201d. The term spread to other jointed or angled supports: in 1627, Captain John Smith (of Pocahontas fame, and also the compiler of several important early glossaries or dictionaries of sailor\u2019s jargon and real usage) defined brackets<\/em> as \u201cthe little carved knees to support the Galleries.\u201d A century later, brackets were buttressing cannons: \u201cthe two \u2018cheeks\u2019 or side-pieces of a gun carriage.\u201d All these body parts soon got mixed up with others, because the word bracket <\/em>comes from a diminutive of breeches <\/em>(Spanish\u00a0bragueta<\/em>;\u00a0Latin\u00a0braca<\/em>, singular of bracae<\/em>), and braca<\/em> sounds a lot like Latin brachia<\/em> (arms), not to mention branca <\/em>(paw, hence an offshoot or branch<\/em>).<\/p>\n

Not that it\u2019s entirely clear what shelves have to do with pants. According to the Oxford English Dictionary<\/em>, <\/em>\u201cProf. Skeat suggests that the \u2018bracket\u2019 of architecture may have been so called from its resemblance to the \u2018codpiece\u2019 of a pair of breeches (Spanish bragueta <\/em>meant both \u2018codpiece\u2019 and \u2018breeches\u2019),\u201d but to me this suggests only that Professor Skeat had bulges on the brain. The OED <\/em>more soberly speculates:<\/p>\n

\n

a name suggested by \u2018breeches\u2019 may naturally have been applied to an apparatus consisting of two limbs set at an angle, like the \u2018bracket\u2019 of shipbuilding, or to appliances used in pairs, like the \u2018brackets\u2019 of a gun-carriage. Then, as a bracket of any kind was generally used for support, the erroneous etymology from Latin brachium <\/em>\u2018arm\u2019 or its Romance derivatives presented itself, and seems to have affected the development of senses.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

From brachia<\/em>, French bras<\/em>, came brace<\/em>, a pair of arms. To \u201cpair of arms\u201d someone is to embrace<\/em>; a brace<\/em> became \u201cthat which clasps, tightens, secures, connects\u201d in general. We have braces on teeth, braces or suspenders holding pants up, and a brassiere to hold and support (apocoped to bra<\/em>). <\/em>A little something that embraces the arm is a word that doubles back on itself, bracelet. <\/em>And then there are the symbols that unite words or lines: braces, \u201c { \u201d and \u201c } \u201d. Was the bracket symbol named after the brace, or after a little jutting shelf, itself named after pants? To bracket<\/em> is now also to group or link: the people in a tax bracket<\/em>, or units of meaning bracketed and rebracketed together.<\/p>\n

Arms and legs, knees and cheeks, wrists and teeth, breasts and pants\u2014and what holds them up, what bulges out in front of them\u2014you can\u2019t stop brackets from grabbing hold of anything and everything, then letting go, splitting apart and clasping close.<\/p>\n

How rebracketing gives us new words. How is a helipad like a cheeseburger? It\u2019s all about arms being legs, and having an ear. There are words that sound right in a language and words that sound wrong, and the latter often, as the gangsters say, go on a little trip. A sound or two will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":754,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[807],"tags":[19139,19140,19141,869,16982,11855,19137,19142,687,16937,1277,19143,19138,19136,19144,2393],"class_list":["post-88783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-translation","tag-brackets","tag-clasps","tag-embraces","tag-english","tag-greek","tag-hamburgers","tag-helicopters","tag-john-smith","tag-language","tag-latin","tag-linguistics","tag-prefixes","tag-pterodactyls","tag-rebracketing","tag-suffixes","tag-words"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHow Rebracketing Gives Us New Words<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Damion Searls on the linguistic phenomenon of rebracketing.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/08\/13\/burgers-and-copters-shelves-and-pants\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Burgers and Copters, Shelves and Pants by Damion Searls\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"August 13, 2015 \u2013 How rebracketing gives us new words. 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Damion Searls<\/a>, the <\/em>Daily\u2019s language columnist<\/a>, is a translator from German, French, Norwegian, and Dutch.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"